Lightroom Classic: Ability to temporarily assign a shortcut to a physical folder

It would be really useful to temporarily assign a shortcut to a physical folder. This would only persist until the end of the session or until you changed it, this would allow you to go off and do things with collections etc. and then jump back to where you started.

Do you mean to a Folder or to a specific image in a folder. IMHO no shortcut needed to go back to a folder. Just open the Folders section and Remember which folder you were in before you moved to the collections or Catalog section of the left hand panel.If you want to go beck to a Specific image you can put that image, or all of the images in the folder it is stored in into the Quick Collection, located in the Catalog section, or you can designate any collection as the Target collection for when you click the little circle in the thumbnail of the image. Just Right Click on the collect you want to use and select "Set As Target Collection" from the popup menu.

Well, I mean a folder in the 'folders' section in the left hand panel of LR Classic. I get what you are suggesting but the reason I would like it is as follows (as a very simple example).

I take a bunch of pics in an arboretum, oak, ash, beech, birch etc. etc. I have collections called oak, ash, beech, birch etc. I select the oak pics and drag them to my oak collection. I then click on the oak collection to flag them/keyword them in some way. I now have to go back to the folder in my folders to do the same with ash etc.

That all seems very straight forward but when you have hundreds of folders and dozens of collections this can be very tedious. Just to do a CTRL+SHFT+L (for example) to return to the last folder I was working in would be really useful for me.

I take the photos "I am working on" and put them in the Quick Collection, and then process them — collections, keywords, even moving them to different folders. I use color tags to create temporary collections when I need more ways of sorting (e.g., these are high ISO images, and I might need to process them differently).

The nice thing about this method is that when I am sure I have finished processing a photo, I just hit cmd-B and, Bam!, out of sight and out of mind.

But we all have our own ways of processing hundreds of photos as quickly as possible.

LR provides a couple of ways to get back quickly to the folder you were working on. You can use the back button to take you back to a previously used source, or click on the menu of recent sources:

You can mark a folder or collection as "favorite" to pin it to the Favorite Sources list.

Unfortunately, there's no keyboard shortcuts for this, a strange omission for such basic functionality. My Any Source plugin provides go back/go forward commands that restore both a previous source and the corresponding selection and filter settings, and you can assign keyboard shortcuts to them. I spend a lot of time curating a large library of old photos, and this makes it much easier to search and navigate.